


never odd or even

by cicak



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Romantic Tragedy, Saving the World, Slow Burn, Ten Years Earlier, all the paradoxes, and looking good doing it, basically a sequel to the film, protagoneil, protagoneil manifesto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26621956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: They have the conversation twice.“There will be a time”, the boss says, “where you will meet the version of me who doesn’t know anything about the future, about the work we do. About us. He won’t know the words or the steps yet. He will make mistakes.”
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 145





	never odd or even

They have _the conversation_ twice.

The first time, it's formal, in an office, just the two of you. This cannot be entered into the record, not even into the false record. “Spoiler protocol”, your shared secretary calls it, and mimes locking her lips before she goes out for a long lunch break, and you sit in the office together with the blinds down.

“There will be a time”, the boss says, “where you will meet the version of me who doesn’t know anything about the future, about the work we do. About us. He won’t know the words or the steps yet. He will make mistakes.”

They’re at work, so Neil doesn’t give him a wisecrack back, but you can read it off the look on his face clear as if he’d said it out loud.

“The time is coming soon. There will be a request in Mumbai, that we will intercept, and you’ll go there as someone from SIS. I won’t insult you by telling you anything else. I trust you now. I trusted you then.”

“Sure, boss”, Neil says, genially.

"Most importantly, you have to stop calling me boss", the boss says, "It's a bad habit. If you’re not careful you're going to give it all away. We’ll be under a lot of stress, and you can’t slip up."

“Surely your younger self won’t be able to guess the nature of the entropic cold war from me being a little overfamiliar? Even you aren’t that good”, Neil says. He’s casual, but there is a tension in the way he holds his hands that you recognise all too well after all these years.

“No. But he’ll guess something. He won’t have time to think about it at the time, and he’ll think about it for a long time afterwards, but he’s got time to do it then. Don’t give it away. Let him earn it. Like I said, I trusted you immediately.”

Neil smiles, leans in on his elbows. “Well, it has been a lot of fun teaching you the dance so far. It’ll be interesting to see the version of you before you had your edges knocked off. How much older than me are you anyway?”

“Four years”, the boss says. “Officially.”

“How long has it been since that was true, though?” Neil asks, but doesn’t hang around for the answer.

* * *

Neil was a student when they first met, someone who, perhaps, in another world, another lifetime, he would go on to make modest developments in the field. Perhaps Professor Neil would come to many of the same deductions without the motivation of the end of the world. Perhaps not. When they meet, Neil is twenty-five, the average age for a master's student. He has a few years of work under his belt, and his personal statement stated that he was wanting to move away from practicalities and into a more theoretical area of research. His supervisor, a mousy northern woman, takes second author on the paper of his dissertation, and she beams on the edge of the famous photograph, on the edge of history. (She joins them after Neil dies, burned out on academia, and never really forgives the “private industry recruiter” for stealing Neil away from her lab. She’s relieved when she finds out all he contributed to the cause, and speaks often of the pleasant surprise of working in a lab named after him).

They meet, this time, in Gothenburg at a huge conference, where Neil is one of thousands of graduate students over five days presenting their research on shiny poster board, hoping that someone will take more than polite interest.

The business card the wide-smiling, well dressed man hands Neil gives his job title as Senior Future Talent Recruiter, but Neil doesn’t recognise the firm. Nevertheless, it's the first card he’s received, so he takes it gladly. (Little does he know then that inside the brushed metal case the “recruiter” slips back into his pocket there are other cards with different names, different approaches, should this not work, should this not be the time.)

They shake hands. Neil answers the recruiter’s perceptive, intelligent questions about his work. This is the place where the timeline splits. This is the start of the story, from one telling of it.

“I was thinking of doing my doctorate”, Neil says to the handsome American recruiter. He wears a better suit than anyone else here, and has insisted on taking him out of the conference centre for coffee. It's spring in Gothenburg, and they're sitting outside in the park.

(“It’s past the yard-arm”, Neil says, “we could get a beer instead?”

“I don’t drink when I’m working”, the recruiter says. “Don’t worry. I know somewhere good.”)

“What in?” the recruiter asks.

Neil talks about quantum fields and supersymmetry and friendship; about Feynman and another guy who in his excitement he forgets the name of to his eternal mortification, talks of of determinism and the theory that there aren't three types of particle, but two, that protons and electrons are like squash balls, bouncing back off some mysterious cosmic wall that transforms them into their inversion. About being able to build that wall, maybe.

“You should”, the recruiter says, simply, and takes a sip of espresso.

“Perhaps, in the fullness of time. Until then, I have a loan to repay”, Neil says, munching the biscuit that came with his coffee. “So I have a few years of work in front of me, first. What's the job?”

“You’d never believe it”, the recruiter says. “But we’re in the business of building walls.”

They talk until it becomes obvious they should order more coffee, so they do, and continue talking until the tables are stacked up around them, and it's dark outside despite the date and the latitude.

The recruiter gets the bill, puts down a twenty kronor note, and when the tray comes back, he looks at the pile of change and does a double take. Lifts out a small Chinese cash from among the crowns and examines it for a long moment like it contains the secrets of the universe, before smiling to himself. “Here,” he says, holding it between his impeccably manicured fingers. “It'll bring you luck.”

“Shouldn’t you keep it? You look like you need some luck.” Neil says, even though he thinks that this recruiter has been lucky to meet him.

“I make my own luck,” the recruiter says, and offers Neil a job.

* * *

When the story is written, far into the future, when this is safely over, Neil's death will be the first act twist. He's the brains, in a way, but also the brawn and the fixer and the fingers and the snark and the comic relief and the love interest. His death devastates them all. God works hard but Neil worked harder, someone said at his funeral. A tough act to follow.

No one remembers the apocalypse that doesn’t happen, but they make sure that they remember Neil.

* * *

He sleeps most of the way back in time.

Ives packs him into a converted shipping container, one they’ve just been made aware of has come from the future for this exact purpose. They hook him up to a horrible set of undignified medical devices, the kind of thing that never shows up in those movies of people in deep cryosleep. He has to wake up for three days every three months and exercise, eat real food, take medication and wash. He will age, in real time, but he won’t go mad.

Or more, they hope he won’t.

Every time he wakes up he looks a little older. He shaves before each cycle, and wakes up with a full beard, scraggly and unkempt, unlike the last face he wore at the end of the world. There’s a bit of grey in his hair after the tenth cycle. He counts each one for the next few cycles, until he loses count.

Someone wakes him up a decade and change before he murdered Priya and fulfilled his promise to Kat. He’s in the enormous container park in Singapore, even if he started off in Rotterdam. For some reason, people saw fit to move him, and in the process they lost him for a while. In the end, he overshot by a couple of years, but it was never an exact science, breaking the laws of physics. He is skinny and old and his elbows and knees are cracked and his suits don’t fit. His muscles have wasted away, and his stomach hurts, but not as much as his eyes do the first time he steps into real sunlight in over a decade. There’s nothing to take from the container but a single envelope marked ‘spoilers’ in an unfamiliar hand. The envelope looks like it was sealed in a hurry; there’s a wrinkle in the flap, but it's stuck down hard. He will need to slit it along the top to get it open.

They feed him chicken rice from a nearby hawker stall. The hawker centre is hot and humid and he sweats immediately, but the food is the best thing he’s ever eaten; each grain of rice is perfect and flavourful, garlic and ginger and chicken fat and salt. He eats two portions and the ten years he’s spent alone, even if it was only 90 days awake, start to fade into a bad dream. His handlers take him back into the car, and by the time they pack him onto a private plane back to Europe he’s fallen into natural, deep, unmedicated sleep.

In the years hence, he wonders whether it would have been better to have a bit more time to think about a grand plan. Maybe he would have made fewer mistakes. Maybe he would have found a way to beat the odds, save the world another way. Maybe what happened doesn’t have to happen.

Or perhaps those thoughts were the madness they were trying to avoid.

* * *

The recruiter becomes the boss, and soon after that the boss becomes the business partner. They all call him Boss, though.

The way Neil’s told it, the boss' name is a secret because a big lie like that is distracting to anyone who gets a sniff of what they are doing. The human brain cannot help but be attracted to big secrets, even if they are always a disappointment, especially in their line of work.

It drives Neil mad, even if it makes sense, even as he knows the purpose behind it. The boss has travelled here, back in time, to prevent a war so enormous and unknowable it will destroy everything, and there’s another version of the boss running around for the CIA right now, oblivious to all of it. It would be bad to compromise _him_. Does the future know about him? Can it track him? Maybe even having an alias would be too much of a give away.

Still, the big question eats away at him. He recognises obsession when it taps him on the shoulder.

He fights it with logic. After all, he tells himself, what name would actually be narratively satisfying? What would be enough to justify the size of the secret? The boss is not some famous actor or the son of a president. Maybe he will be someone famous in the future, but in this time, he’s nobody.

“He's a smug git”, Neil thinks, after an early meeting that had ended with too many questions and nowhere near enough answers, the boss enigmatic and tight-lipped. “Smug and handsome and well dressed. But he’s right.”

Eventually, though, like all mysteries, it is solved. Someone finds out, and he uses his newfound skills to break into their office and find it, and then feels so guilty that he bribes it out of them so he feels a bit better.

The name is boring. American. Late night he signs into facebook and counts seventy men of that name before he loses count. (His boss is none of them).

One day, as an experiment, Neil calls the boss by his name. Just casually throws out the big secret and asks him to pass over a screwdriver. The boss looks up from his laptop, a moment later. "Sure," he says, and hands it over. Their fingers touch, and the world doesn’t end.

* * *

It's a spring day again, two years after Gothenburg; and they've got meetings upon meetings (and it's a joke that one day they’ll use this world-destroying tech to fit in more meetings. (“Alright, Hermione”, Neil joked.)

Neil calls and he sounds manic. “Come to the lab”, he says, breathless.

The laboratory team has built them a machine and it _works_ , the way it always has worked, the way it will work, but it works in this time and place for the first time. It’s small for now and can only invert things under an inch in diameter, but it's stable, unlike their earlier attempts. The team picks a single six-sided die to start, and they all take turns that afternoon catching it off the table. It fails to get old.

Once the breakthrough is made, they need to move offices, find somewhere discreet, with better power facilities and fewer questions asked. In the end, they end up in a custom built building. It almost breaks them, their company, the whole situation. It gets them noticed for the first time by the security services. Most of the agencies are dealt with by the Boss, but the CIA are persistent with the way they offer the world, dangling the might of the US economy over them, for just a small price of everything they have.

“You gentlemen should think about your patriotic duty”, the man from Langley says, exasperated by their polite refusals.

“I’m British”, Neil says, examining his fingernails. “Most of us are, actually, apart from the Boss.”

The man from Langley leaves a card and a threat. “You’ll run out of money eventually, gentlemen. When you do, give us a call. You’ll find our terms are more favourable than Her Majesty’s.”

“Fuck”, Neil says to the quiet room as the polished CIA issue shoes echo down the hall. He rubs his face, and pushes his hair back in frustration. “He’s not wrong. We can’t keep it up forever. Black market isotopes and Saville Row suits don’t come cheap. Eventually we’ll go bankrupt or we’ll have to let someone in on the party.”

“I’ll sort it”, the boss says, and that night opens a safe no one knows about, and takes out an envelope marked ‘spoilers’ in a hand he now recognises as Neil’s, and slices open the top with the ridge of his thumbnail. There’s a folded piece of paper marked “money” sitting at the front. Within it is a list of instructions.

He sits at the computer and types code he doesn’t understand into a program he’s never used before. It's not hard to do, and it's interesting, especially as he knows that bitcoin is going to dominate headlines for its rapid growth in not too many years. Knowing ecological Armageddon is coming, it feels good to fund saving the world with wasteful anonymous technological greed. He holds thousands that he never needs to sell, but the autonomy is worth it.

It turns out that making money is easy if you know what you’re going to do.

“You made it a paradox”, Neil says later, over whisky and sodas in the boss’ lavish office in their new building. His body language betrays his disapproval. “What did I tell you?”

“The bootstrap paradox is the most patriotic of paradoxes”, the man who invented Satoshi Nakamura says. “Also, someone once told me there’s no solution to paradoxes, so I figure I can just ignore it until it becomes a problem.”

* * *

“I need you to learn Estonian, Ukranian, Russian, Swedish and French”, the Boss says to him, a couple of weeks after they first invert together and everything changes.

“Do they even offer all those on duolingo?” Neil snarks, not looking up.

The boss tosses him a book. Learn Russian in Thirty Days lands heavily on his keyboard, inserting a line of gibberish into his code. Neil finally looks up, and can’t help but grin. He gestures to his desk, a perpetual mess.. “Where am I going to get thirty days? I’m snowed under.” His computer pings a new email as a punch line.

“Have you ever shot a gun?” The boss asks. Neil wrinkles his nose. “No. Well. Airsoft on a stag do once. Doesn’t count”.

“No”, the boss says drily, and rubs his hands together. He looks excited. “But don’t worry. When I’m done with you, you’ll be perfect.”

They set out together to test the machine, living the same day over and over and over, back and forth, speaking to each other in other languages until the fabric of reality is worn thin by their footsteps and fingernails scraping across the weave. Reality is thankfully much more robust than they had feared. The fabric of reality barely notices two men swimming upstream, no matter what they do (and they do a lot of things that previously man thought would destroy the world.)

At the end, Neil does the calculation and works out he’s one hundred days older than he should be, from all the time spent going backwards, but he can speak Russian and Estonian now and is proficient in picking locks, can hold his breath for a full minute and can handle a gun with ease.

The converted container they’re in has two beds, because no one knows yet what happened the first time they went through the device together.

“You don’t need to groom me”, Neil whispers into the dark. “I’m a sure thing. I hope you know that.”

“I know.” the boss whispers back. “It's why I have to.”

* * *

There are so many reasons not to fall in love with Neil. It would be madness to fall in love with someone who you know will die young. To fall in love with someone who works for you. To fall in love with someone who you’ve already seen walk off cheerily to his death. Someone you’ve already seen die.

It would be mad to _choose_ to fall in love with him. He _chooses_ not to.

Let someone else fall in love with him, he thinks. Someone who will mourn him properly, someone who isn’t messed up from all the switching back and forth through time. Someone younger.

Compartmentalisation is the punchline to every joke told at Langley. It's the solution to every spy problem; push it down, put it in a box and _crush it_. Make the choice to make it tomorrow’s problem. If it's going to compromise the mission, don’t let it. You are the master of your own destiny. They can’t get the psychopaths these days, went the joke, so we have to train you to be a bloodless motherfucker who is prepared to kill his own wife if he has to.

(He wasn’t very good at it. Still isn’t.)

He’s older and wiser and yet he knows it cannot be tomorrow’s problem, because he lives in perpetual yesterday now.

It takes him a few years of near misses. He stops drinking, so as to remove the temptation of whisky and low light. It doesn’t help.

In the end he decides that it's unfair to allow someone else to get hurt on the day when he sends Neil to Kiev with a box of inverted bullets and a decade and change of careful preparation to help his earlier self. It's his burden to bear, he tells himself, and throws all the boxes open.

* * *

Neil lives in a modest flat, full of art prints and books and dust on every surface, cat hair and dander and skin flakes and stardust collecting in the corners, even if his cat died a year ago now. There's a piano in the hall that has to be tuned a whole tone down, so old and decrepit it is, but it still makes a beautiful noise when Neil’s had a couple of glasses of wine and gets a hankering to try and play Joplin. He has a big bed, solid, made from industrial pipes, the metal frame giving the space within a slight Faraday cage effect. The controller of his console can't stay connected, so there's a long cable snaking in among the bed clothes that gets tangled in their feet and the quilt, and on the other side of the room the PlayStation teeters on the edge, and finally falls, when they get distracted and tangled up in each other.

“You'd think a physicist would understand how a metal bed would be a hindrance”, the man who started as the recruiter, became the Boss, but is now the lover of Neil, gripes from under his hot hands and beautiful mouth.

The handsome cartoon pirate on screen declares he's the leading man over and over, stuck in a loop. (You know what they say about a leading man? He never dies), until eventually there’s a break in their passion long enough to disentangle from each other and pull the plug.

They travel so much there’s no much point moving; there’s too many facilities to oversee, too many balls in the air at once to entertain the fiction of his own home. It’s not like he has that much stuff anyway.

* * *

The first time Neil inverts is the seventh time for you, but this is the first time the full-sized machine has been turned on, the first time in history that human beings have run counter to the prevailing winds of time.

You go through together. Neil steps out first, one small step, just as you saw a few seconds earlier, when you looked through the glass at history happening and strode forward.

“I don’t feel different”, Neil says, looking at his hands, walking backwards. The room they just left looks odd, the light falling wrong. Here it just looks normal. There was no doubt that it would work. The room had already been flooded with air through the turnstile, so they can breathe normally.

“I don’t know what I expected it to feel like though.” He looks up, and frowns. “Do I look different?”

“No”, you say. “You look the same.”

“Then why,” Neil says, slowly, “Are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” you reply, mouth dry.

Neil doesn’t speak his answer, just steps forward and kisses you. It's dry and chaste, a test of boundaries, of a hypothesis. Ever the scientist.

You weren’t trained in the scientific method though, so you kiss back with blood and fire and certainty, push back the boundaries.

If someone could see you through the glass, both these kisses would be strange and backwards and make people uncomfortable. The way your lips move unnatural and wrong and somehow more obscene.

From your perspective it’s exactly as it's supposed to be.

* * *

The whole team has been locked away the last few days, brainstorming. It's the day they come up with the pincer movement. It’s exciting, and the Boss tells them to take a break for 20 minutes. “Can I speak to you outside?” he says, and Neil doesn’t think twice about it. The boss smiles that charming smile to the rest of the team. “Gentlemen. We’ll be back on the hour. Don’t restart without us.”

“Where are we going?” Neil asks, and the Boss just gives him a look and walks off in the direction of the turnstile.

When they get there, there’s a container reserved under the Boss’ code, and he hustles them through, manning the controls himself. (it's the one with the good bed).

Most of the time, the Boss is a generous and creative lover, but then there are days when he gets covetous, rough, like he can’t get enough of Neil’s lanky body, can’t stop touching him, can’t tear his mouth away, won’t let Neil catch his breath before starting again, drawing every fuck out for as long as they can. It's not the first time they’ve done this at work, or even done it backwards, but never like this, a stolen few hours in the middle of a meeting.

He gets in those moods, and however pleasurable it is, Neil has a cold, low feeling in the pit of his stomach that this means something other than him being irresistible.It's the things he says. The way he talks about how he wants to take his time, how there’ll never be enough. The way he begs.

It’s not worth it, backtracking like this, even if it's fun at the time. It means hiding away until it's safe to rejoin the passing of time.

Later, when they’re going through the turnstile to rejoin the meeting as promised, a few minutes after they left, Neil mans the controls this time, so the Boss goes through first.

When he goes to switch back, the Boss is standing there. “uoy evoL” he mouths through the glass, and is gone when Neil comes back to the forward flow of time.

* * *

The test comes early in the process of formalising saving the world. It was the first thing he was told about this, the first day of this afterlife. When you are fighting against forces so distant you will never see them, it's important to know who is serious. The test he gives Neil isn’t as brutal as the one he gives his future self, but he doesn’t know why it was important yet. He’s fairly sure that the world will put him right.

He knows the technology gets out. There is a mole in their organisation. There was a turnstile in the heart of Siberia, ten years from now, and there’s no way they will build it. So, someone has to.

The R&D department, once the first turnstile is perfected, go wild developing newer and more fantastical form factors. They build them all. They invert tanks and armies and towns. They are gods. There was no reason for any of them to sell them out. They passed the test.

This was why the test had to change. It is not enough to know what to say, you have to believe it. They spent so long trying to account for all the different time travel paradoxes. The hardest one was how to deal with liars who pretend they are loyal.

(Turns out there’s a paradox for that too, and ignoring it doesn’t work all that well.)

Neil doesn't give it away until the end. Now, he knows, it was all there on his face, even as his mouth said friendship. Loyal to the plan. The ultimate test.

* * *

There’s something coming. He has his suspicions.

For all the boss lectures them all (mostly Neil) about the sanctity of the timeline, about being cocky bastards with the knowledge they have, this is a non-linear life. They can never forget that they aren’t the only people with the technology. In many ways they’re the last people to get it, and by dint of inventing it, they have the oldest version. It's why they have to be cleverer, more devious.

He suspects that there’s something coming, and that maybe he won’t come out of it the same. He knows the Boss has been preparing him, and it seems right to reciprocate.

Neil finds the Boss in Ives’ office, shooting the shit in that military way they usually do. Macho assholery as a competitive sport, too exaggerated to be anything but a joke, the mild-mannered boss laughing filthily and calling Ives a motherfucker.

When the Boss leaves, Neil slides the envelope he’s carrying onto Ives’ desk, face down, hiding the inscription. The envelope is so full it was hard to seal, and there’s a wrinkle in the flap when he misjudged the alignment, but it's stuck down tight.

* * *

The day arrives. The fourteenth. Across the world there are doppelgangers of himself, Neil, Kat and Sator weaving a delicate web of lies. A decade’s worth of chess pieces are in place, even if the game they’re playing bears no resemblance to chess (except for the duality, the byzantine rules, the fact he’s about to sacrifice the most powerful piece on the board)

He doesn’t read the cards in the envelope marked spoilers until after Neil’s flight leaves for Mumbai. Things were going so well, he never really thought about them much. There were no problems they couldn’t solve as a team. The team is huge now, a secret web of people saving the world. A lifetime’s work crammed into a decade and change. Hopefully it’ll be enough.

When he opens the safe, he wonders if Neil ever found it. The safe is supposedly uncrackable, but that never stopped him before. He can’t remember whether the envelope was where he left it, whether it's been tampered with at all. He lays the contents out on the desk face down, and turns the first one over.

Kiev, one says. He nods to himself. Done. The next.

Elbow, another says, and the memory comes up unbidden of the first time he kissed his elbow, the noise that Neil made, and the swell of pleasurable surprise at the response, and it all feels too much.

He puts the rest away for another time.

* * *

The second time they have _the conversation_ it's years later and goes differently to the first time.

The stream of nightmare fuel they’re detecting from the future war is accelerating now they have worked out how to detect it at range. Every day, more and more inverted materials are discovered and stored in their research centres.

They return to Sweden together for a meeting with the team there. The vault is in a warehouse and crammed from floor to ceiling with meticulously documented destruction.

They’re there because there was a near miss recently. A bomb, armed and on a long timer, waiting for their team when they went to dig it up. The team got away with superficial injuries, but everyone in the room was sombre, in a reflective mood. Mortality does that to a person.

“You have to stop looking at me like that”, Neil says, once the meeting breaks up, “or you're going to give it all away.”

“Like what?”

“Like the human personification of the heart eyes emoji.”

“Like the _what_?”

“Christ,” the boss groans, when Neil draws one on a post-it, a little smiling face with hearts for eyes. “I don’t look like that.”

Neil shrugs. “Sorry, I just tell it like it is.”

The boss takes out his phone and takes a selfie, and looks at it. “Huh, you’re right. I _do_ look like a man in love.”

There’s not much one can say to that.

The boss slumps in his chair and sighs deeply. The room is freezing, and they’re both wearing their coats, even though it's early summer in Sweden, they’re far north enough that it doesn't make much difference.

“Keeping this all straight kills me sometimes,” he confesses.

Neil smirks. “There's not much about this that's all that straight, Boss.”

The boss gives the side-eye that quells junior researchers, but that only makes Neil love him more. “Don’t rip reality apart for a cheap innuendo. That bomb is the start. Who knows what they could send back next time? We have to be vigilant.”

Neil shrugs. “Let them try. What happens, happens. If we’re going to fuck it up, might as well go out in style.”

* * *

Neil puts his big hands on your face and kisses you. You don’t know, in that moment, that it's for the last time. You are interrupted by the insistent ringing of Neil’s phone, buzzing away in his breast pocket, against your heart. When he pulls it out, you see the number begins with +91 22 - Mumbai area code. Neil steps back to take the call, and there’s a voice in the phone that is clipped and British, and that’s it, that’s the end.

* * *

If he’s learned one thing about living the same decade twice, it's that the universe doesn't give a shit about him. That despite everything, he’s still here.

(That's how he knows they win.)

**Author's Note:**

> Came out of this film and felt bowled over by how much Nolan loves hot dudes in suits having chemistry in a scifi universe, which coincidentally, I also love! Will this fandom be the second coming of Inception? Unlikely. Won’t stop me though. Before I start writing coffee shop AUs though, I needed to purge all the FEELINGS I had in my brain.
> 
> Brainstorming this was so much fun, as was writing it. I've only seen the film once, so I am indebted to [this diagram](https://i.redd.it/mbbte0s4cpj51.png) for allowing me to get over my lingering questions about the plot and really focus on inventing a love story/sequel.  
> I also reread Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which helped me conceptualise this story. 
> 
> There’s so many dumb references in this, and the title is a classic palindrome. Do I regret it? Maybe the title. 
> 
> If you want to come and yell at me about this story or anything really, I'm on tumblr at [cicaklah](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com), where I continue to write fanfic to avoid my PhD write up.


End file.
